Exploring Southeastern Archaeology ed. by Patricia Galloway and Evan Peacock (review)

Exploring Southeastern Archaeology was assembled to honor the long career of Samuel O. Brookes, an archaeologist for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service in Mississippi from 1987 until his retirement in 2011. Brookes was responsible for protecting and investigating archaeological sites located on federally owned forest lands in the state. Potential readers may expect the book to provide broad coverage of the archaeology of the Southeast. In fact, fourteen of the sixteen chapters center on archaeology in Mississippi. The title also evokes the generality of a textbook, suggesting that the content is written for a wide audience, but most of the chapters require knowledge of archaeological terminology and a familiarity with the profession.

Part 1 describes public archaeology programs in Mississippi’s national forests and their positive results. Editors Patricia Galloway and Evan Peacock introduce the volume by explaining the practice of cultural resource management, public archaeology, and Brookes’s successes therein. Peacock expands on these topics in chapter 2 by summarizing the contributions of Brookes-era forest archaeology, especially the dozens of publications based on data collected from Mississippi’s national forests by Brookes, his colleagues, and his protégés, and how their findings are shared with the general public. In chapter 3 Cliff Jenkins discusses the development of the Lower Delta Mound Trail, a self-guided driving tour of the extensive prehistoric Indian mounds in the lower Mississippi Delta. Creation of the trail involved summarizing the characteristics of the known mounds and an evaluation of their current conditions and major threats to their preservation.

The next twelve chapters are grouped chronologically by cultural period. Part 2 discusses topics relating to the Archaic period. In chapter 4 Brookes and Melissa H. Twaroski explain the impact of the Hypsithermal, a warming phenomenon that occurred roughly between 8,500 and 5,000 years ago. They review multiple sources of geological and archaeological data to posit that environmental changes during the Hypsithermal served simultaneously to disrupt and to catalyze, leading to significant migrations of people and innovations in material culture. Chapter 5, by Jessica Crawford, presents a much-needed summary of the stone effigy beads unique to the Middle Archaic period in the mid-South. Crawford evaluates the hypothesis that these beads may have been totemic symbols used to facilitate long-distance exchange networks. The authors of chapter 6, Alison M. Hadley and Philip J. Carr, investigate whether the beads were made by craft specialists. The results could have implications for understanding the level of cultural complexity among Middle Archaic peoples, but Hadley and Carr admit that their organization of technology model does not work well to evaluate symbolic artifacts like chert effigy beads.

The most famous Archaic-period site is Poverty Point in northeast Louisiana. A marker of Poverty Point’s influential culture is the widespread distribution of small, baked clay objects, known as Poverty Point Objects (PPOs), believed to have been used as a type of cooking stone. In chapter 7 Christopher T. Hays, James B. Stoltman, and Richard A. Weinstein analyze the composition and form of PPOs from four states to determine if some types were unique to the regions in which they are found or if they were imports. This chapter’s excellent summary of PPO types and data is part of a larger, as yet unpublished, study whose initial results are already improving our understanding of the Poverty Point exchange network.

Part 3 includes five chapters focusing on sites dating to the Woodland and Mississippian periods. In chapter 8 Peacock examines sites associated with the poorly understood Early Woodland Tchula culture. His data from surveys and excavations in the Holly Springs National Forest in the northern Mississippi uplands helps refine the differences among sedentary and seasonal occupations and special-purpose sites. Given the lack of information on Tchula period culture, especially in the upland forests, the data on ceramics and stone artifacts deserves publication.

In chapter 9 Keith...